This past two weeks gave us a good look at the character of different leaders:

One, Peyton Manning, the football genius, stood on a podium and accepted blame for his bad play leading to a defeat for his team.

The other, President Obama, again refused to accept the truth by blaming someone else for mistakes of his administration. In this case, he repeated that the massacre of his ambassador to Libya and three other Americans was sparked singly by Muslim fanatics being insulted by a crappy little video invented by some nut in California. Obama’s denial of responsibility, a failure to protect Americans, came a day after his own National Counter-Terrorism Center revealed that the murders were an act of deliberate terrorism fed by Al Qaeda.

At the same time, the president deflected attention from the central issue by declaring that Mitt Romney was a bad guy for “jumping the gun” over the attacks on our embassies. (Romney criticized Obama’s State Department for apologizing for the offending video.)

The episodes were a perfect study, not just of Obama’s weakness in leadership but of his campaign’s attempt to cover up his miserable performance in the White House with personal attacks on Romney.

Obama has presided over the worst economic recovery from a recession in U.S. history. His let’s-be-nice foreign policy has led to violent anti-American riots worldwide. His double-cross of Israel denies the Holocaust. His allowing Iran to move forward on nuclear weapons presents the probability of nuclear attacks on U.S. cities plus the annihilation of Israel.

His Democratic-controlled Senate’s refusal to pass a single budget in four years is evidence that his administration has no intent to rein in spending, nor to create jobs, nor to reduce a $16 trillion debt that will someday soon destroy our nation. Your grandchildren have a future that dwells in poverty.

President Obama’s supporters continue to fabricate myths and slogans about his political challengers as people who despise women, kick the poor, hate gays, blacks and Latinos and hoard piles of gold. (Couldn’t the Republicans counter the “War on Women” absurdity with an insistence that pro-abortion Democrats are conducting a “War on Children”?)

Listen carefully to Obama’s one and only message for economic recovery: “Millionaires and billionaires should pay their fair share.” (If you taxed all the billionaires and millionaires in the U.S. at 100 percent, the government will have enough money for 8.5 days. Whoopee!)

Of course, Romney’s writing off of the 47 percent of Americans on entitlements was recorded as a major gaffe, but at least the press, in pummeling Romney, was forced to expose that 47 percent of the people pay no income tax, according to the Washington Post, September 19. If they were taxed just a teensy-weensy bit, wouldn’t that fit Obama’s concept of “fair share”? And why did Obama’s adoring media, on the day after the Libyan killings, find time to rough up Romney while not asking why Obama thought it was more important to fly to Las Vegas for a fundraiser instead of staying in Washington and investigating why our security in Libya lapsed so badly that an American ambassador and three other Americans were murdered? That is one reason why 60 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, no longer trust the media.

Romney questions Obama’s sorry record of increasing poverty while borrowing and spending $1 trillion a year. Is this the record of a champion of minorities? From the Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2012: “Black unemployment now stands at 13.6%, up from 13% the month before; for Latinos, the unemployment rate rose to 11% from 10.3% in April.”

What have four years of “Hope and Change” wrought? Remember the pledge that “you will not pay one dime in new taxes” for Obamacare? The Congressional Budget Office reported last week that the penalty for not carrying insurance will clobber the life savings of middle class families. The CBO said that about 76 percent of those who stand to be slapped with the tax penalty for Obamacare are those earning less than $120,000.

Obama himself announced last week that his four years in Washington have been a waste of time. “You can’t change Washington from within,” he said. So now is he saying that after re-election he will govern from Chicago?

The one very clear issue is big vs. small government. Some arithmetic: In less than four years, Obama has doubled the debt that George W. Bush enhanced in his eight years and with miserable results.

The media’s failure to vet their hero is one reason why books like The Amateur, written by Ed Klein, a former New York Times editor, and movies like 2016, Obama’s America by Dinesh D’Sousa, have become so popular.

It’s pretty simple: A man who can’t take responsibility for his actions is suspect in character and doesn’t deserve our respect. Obama, meet Peyton Manning, who took his failures like a man, who instead of standing up could have taken a cue from our president by blaming his game-losing three interceptions on Tim Tebow.